The Pallbearers

Chapter 10

The medical examiner's office is on North Mission Road, not far from Parker Center. It's located on the top two floors of an ugly rectangular building that always reminds me of a large cement shoe box.

I pulled into the lot at seven the next morning and looked for Ray Tsu's brown Toyota. I'd already called ahead and found out that Ray's ME section had done the police autopsy on Walter Dix.

Ray is one of three chief coroners working under the L. A. medical examiner. He currently supervises the midnight to eight shift, which is the busy one because most murders occur after midnight. After his shift ends, Ray usually goes to breakfast. That's why I was down here so early.

I spotted his car on the east side of the lot in a marked row of spaces reserved for the ME's staff, so I parked in visitors and went inside.

Mission Road is not one of my favorite places, but a lot of my favorite police work gets done here. Its the morbid pall that overhangs a building devoted solely to death that always pulls me down.

I called upstairs from reception and offered to buy Ray breakfast if he'd bring a photocopy of the Dix file with him. No crime had supposedly been committed, so I didn't think he would have a problem sharing the death report. Ray did, however, ask me why.

"Walter Dix ran the group home where I was raised as a foster kid," I told him over the lobby phone. "We buried him yesterday and a lot of the people who also grew up there didn't believe he would kill himself. I told them I'd look at the file. Get some kind of closure for us or something," trying to low key it.

"Where will we be dining?" Ray said in his soft, almost effeminate voice.

"How about the Breakfast Bagel?" I suggested because it was close and cheap.

"How about the Pacific Dining Car?"

"Jesus, Ray. You seen the prices on the menu there?"

"You want a cheap date, call Hairy Mary in forensics." He paused, then asked, "You want this file or not?"

"God, you're such a whore."

"Be right down."

Ray was a rare piece of meat, a rail-thin Chinese American with fine black hair, which he wore long and parted in the middle, tucked behind each ear. A hairstyle that always reminded me of tie-back drapes. He spoke in such a soft voice that he'd been nicknamed Fey Ray by the homicide detectives who dealt with him.

But Ray knew his stuff. He'd started out as a crime-scene criminalist, then went to medical school. He now supervised a staff of ten medical examiners and dieners. But Ray wasn't content to be an office jock. He was a devoted cutter who, despite his management position, still did a good bit of table work.

We snagged a booth at the back of the original Pacific Dining Car on 6th Street, which is a great L. A. landmark restaurant, close enough to the downtown financial center to be a stockbroker hangout. The interior is done in red leather with green upholstered walls and brass fixtures. A polished oak bar dominates the Grill Room, where we were seated.

Ray Tsu didn't weigh much more than a hundred pounds, but he ordered a big enough breakfast for two or three NFL linemen.

"You planning on brown-bagging that to nibble on throughout the week?" I groused.

"I'll get it all down, just watch."

After our food came we got around to Walt's autopsy.

"It was a standard do-it-yourself shooting," Ray said between bites of steak, hash browns, and eggs. He slid the file across the table to me. "Of course, unless we have video or pictures of the actual capping, we can only call it a probable. But there was nothing that indicated any unusual circumstances."

I opened the file and thumbed through the ME's pictures of Pop. He was laid out on an autopsy table under harsh lights with half of his head missing. I'd seen plenty of similar shots over the years, but these knotted my stomach and shot a bolt of emotional guilt through me.

"You did this one yourself?" I asked, putting the photos aside and looking at ten pages of small print and Latin medical phrases.

"No. We usually give our newbies the slam dunks, which include most of the obvious suicides like this one."

He reached over and spun the file around so he could read it. "This was done by Barbara Wilkes. She's only been with us for six months, but she's thorough. Does great work."

"So I won't have to translate all this Latin, give me the top line."

Ray looked down at the report. "Twelve-gauge shotgun blast took the back of the deceased's head. The load hit him on the right side at the mastoid bone. The weapon was a Winchester Speed Pump Defender with an eighteen-inch barrel registered to Walter Dix. It was found on the grass just off the back porch, lying at a forty-degree angle, barrel away from the back of the chair he was on, which was tipped over with him still in it. He was holding the Winchester with his extended right hand, the barrel resting on his shoulder, head turned away. When the shotgun kicked, it threw itself over his right shoulder, onto the back lawn behind him. That would be the correct general position for what this looks like. He turned his mastoid area and the back of his head into red sauce and pasta. Blew his arithmetic all over the grass."

I winced and Ray smiled sadly.

"Sorry. Forgot you were his friend. He obliterated everything from his brain stem to the left side of his skull at the occipital bone. No other way to say it."

"Okay. How about the body cavity? Any blunt-force trauma?"

"No evidence that he was beaten before he died, if that's your question. No body contusions, bruises, or bone breaks. The blood-tox screen was normal-no drugs or alcohol. The homicide dicks have a file with his suicide note. I looked at it before I assigned Barbara to the autopsy. The standard 'Sorry, but I can't go on, my life is over' riff but full of surf lingo." He looked down at his ME report. "It was investigated by Kovacevich and Cole. It's not on here, but I think they said they were on the homicide desk over in Shootin' Newton."

I couldn't understand why Newton Division homicide dicks would answer a call in Harbor City, which is out of their basic car area, but I didn't argue. I'd check that myself.

"It reads as a straight suicide, Shane," Ray continued. "Guy did himself in."

I sat thinking about this while Tsu shoveled down his entire breakfast as promised. I had no appetite, so I'd only ordered a fruit plate, but hadn't touched it.

"You want that?" Fey Ray asked softly, pointing with his knife at my still-pristine plate of sliced grapefruit, strawberries, and oranges.

"Help yourself," I offered.

He pulled it over and dug in but was glancing up at me from time to time while he ate, checking me out.

"Listen, Shane. Nobody knows what goes through another guys mind. You remember Richard Jeni?"

"The comedian?"

"Yeah. I did his postmortem. One of the funniest comics ever. Seemed like a happy guy. Sense of humor like you wouldn't believe. The guy was a total rip, but, despite that, he did himself. Tragic. You can't judge by outward appearances. I've seen too many of these that seem wrong on the surface but aren't. You and your friends should let it go."

"Yeah," I finally said. "You're probably right."

After breakfast, I drove Ray back to Mission Road and dropped him.

I kept Walt's death report on the seat beside me.